Turning coins into notes at Paddy Power: an interview with CIO Fin Goulding

Goulding tells Computing he is looking to get the most out of data by bringing many of the company's information sources together in one model

Fin Goulding took over the role of CIO at Paddy Power when the bookmaker was going through a significant transition. In the three years since he arrived, he has refreshed the firm's IT infrastructure and as a result, the firm can now fully focus on a smaller number of initiatives.

"We're doing some work around software-defined infrastructure and software-defined data centres, and dipping our toe into the hybrid cloud, for example," Goulding tells Computing.

The firm has also put in place a data strategy, but Goulding emphasises that this needs to keep evolving, and the company is therefore constantly looking at what it needs to add to the firm.

"We're doing a lot of work using a lot of tools for big data, and looking at combining customer operational and technical data – like we do using Splunk – altogether," he says.

He gives an analogy of big data being like millions of pounds in coins.

"How do I get my arms around it? How do I control it? If I turn it into notes it is an easier way for me to carry it and sort it and I think that's what a lot of firms are struggling with - plenty of data but not necessarily the skills to manage it," Goulding suggests.

So how about managing all this data?

The firm currently uses AppDynamics and Splunk as performance management tools to gain insight into what is happening with its systems. It plans to use Splunk for business analytics purposes further down the line. But this is just one facet of an overarching data model that the company is looking to create.

"You have unstructured data so we may use some sort of platform like Hadoop; we have structured technical data for which we use Splunk; then there is data warehousing, personalisation data and all those sorts of things so everyone is trying to get their arms around it," he says.

But Paddy Power is in the midst of a tender process which will give it more of an idea which approach to take.

"I'm not sure if one platform is the right thing or multiple-layered platforms – we're trying to get our heads around it," says Goulding.

Not always a need for new skills

One of the recurring themes when speaking to Goulding was his view that many of the skillsets that are currently sought after, already exist under different name tags.

Indeed, he believes the much-hyped 'data scientist' is just a different label for a skillset that already existed.

Similarly, he believes the role of the chief digital officer is already being carried out at Paddy Power by the chief product officer.

"It's a role which predominantly looks at what we're doing in mobile and desktop. It is what we're doing in the digital and marketing world but we don't have it as a CDO. It's centred more around products," he says.

After talking to several CDOs, he concludes that the CDO role is essentially, "technical marketing".

And it's not just the CDO and data scientists that he believes he already has at his disposal, albeit under different job titles.

Despite an apparent IT skills shortage in DevOps, Goulding believes existing staff can be trained to work in a DevOps environment, although he acknowledges that it may take some time for them to adapt to a new way of working.

"Some people don't like to let go of things in which they've built up skills and be shifted to something brand new," he says.

Goulding believes the problem can be to do with the lack of soft skills that many of the staff have.

"Often if you haven't got those people skills, you have to bring them in and have people help you – these will be occupational-type psychologists or design experts, for example, and you have to go through a change and bring people on that journey and that's really hard for us.

"But once you start saying to people 'this is how it's going to work, it's going to make your job more enjoyable, we're going to give you access to things you've never had before and break down some barriers and silos', you start to hit a tipping point where people get really interested," he claims.

So is there a specific skillset where he believes there is a shortage?

"I would say that anyone who is in college now should start learning Java quickly because there is a shortage worldwide," he says.

"We try to compete in terms of getting the right people on board; we're very clear about who we are and the things we do, but it is pretty tough. I'm based in Dublin and Silicon Shamrock is full of companies like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn where the brightest people have great opportunities to work almost anywhere right now," he adds.

But Goulding suggests that for some of the brightest talents, there can be frustration at working for some of the big tech firms in the area, and this can benefit the likes of Paddy Power.

"For many of the organisations that are setting themselves up – once [the employees] are there for a while, maybe they are not in the head office of the organisation or close to the decision makers and they can find it quite frustrating. Our head office is in Dublin, and [everyone] is very approachable, and even though we are a large company there is a family feel to these things; people talk to each other – it's a collaborative, fun environment," he says.

Betting on 2016 for cloud

Paddy Power uses cloud-based corporate systems such as those in HR and finance, using SaaS tools offered by the likes of Salesforce.com. But it hasn't yet bet on the cloud in any other capacity, which is particularly surprising given that betting firms are used to dealing with huge spikes of activity during the year for sports events such as the Champions League final or the Grand National – an area which cloud computing would surely be helpful with in terms of scaling up and down.

So is the lack of cloud computing down to the highly regulated industry that Paddy Power finds itself in?

"Not necessarily; we have our own internal teams that look at risk management and we have to satisfy their needs. I think any company that is putting customer data or any data in the cloud should take it seriously. We are highly regulated as a business but that's the way it is – it's normal for us. We only work in regulated markets, and we prefer that, we're following the rules," Goulding says.

He insists that if a company is using the cloud it has to make sure "it's safe, secure and reliable".

"It's your data that you're hosting somewhere else so I don't see [regulation] necessarily being an issue, it's just the timing and the tools are not as mature as they will be. It's about the tools to be able to shift into the cloud, seamlessly and back again... I think next year is going to be the year that enterprise-level cloud starts to become more interesting for us. We take security and protection of our data very seriously, and it's not something you move into that simply," he says.

...And one final decision

Having chosen to move to Windows 10 despite having only shifted to Windows 8 last year, Paddy Power is still to decide which office collaboration tools it is going to use going forwards.

"We're negotiating between Microsoft and Google. Google has a great product set in terms of its enterprise apps and Microsoft has come up on the rails with [Office 365] with quite a surprise in terms of usability and flexibility. It will be interesting to see how Skype for Business works for collaboration, as that's something Google has got a robust solution with Hangouts," Goulding states.